The Short Stories of Jack Williamson

By Jack Williamson

John Stewart Williamson was born on 29th April 1908 in Bisbee, Arizona Territory. His early years were spent in Western Texas and then New Mexico.

Writing as Jack Williamson his first published story was ‘The Metal Man’ and it cover-featured on the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. He followed this up with many other cover-featured stories ‘Through the Purple Cloud’ (May 1931 Wonder Stories) his novella ‘Wolves of Darkness’ (January 1932 Strange Tales), ‘The Pigmy Planet’ (February 1932 Astounding Stories), ‘The Moon Era’ (February 1932 Wonder Stories), ‘Wizard's Isle’ (a novelette in the June 1934 Weird Tales).

As Nils O. Sonderlund, he published ‘The Angel from Hell’ in the December 1939 Marvel Tales. He also wrote under the names Will Stewart and John Stewart.

Early on, Williamson became impressed by the works of Miles J. Breuer, a doctor who in his spare time wrote science fiction. They began to collaborate, and Williamson’s work became more structured. Their first work was a novel; ‘Birth of a New Republic’ in which Moon colonies went through something akin to the American Revolution.

Williamson had been wracked by emotional torments and believed his physical ailments to be psychosomatic. He undertook psychiatric evaluation in 1933 in an attempt to resolve the conflict between his reason and his emotion. His stories now took on a grittier, more realistic tone.

Intriguingly a negative review of one of his books, which compared his writing to that of a comic strip, brought him the attention of The New York Sunday News, which needed a new comic strip. Williamson wrote the strip Beyond Mars (1952–55), loosely based on his novel ‘Seetee Ship’, until the paper dropped all comics.

Beginning 1954 Williamson and Frederick Pohl wrote more than a dozen science fiction novels together, including the series ‘Jim Eden’, ‘Starchild’, and ‘Cuckoo’.

Williamson now gathered up a clutch of awards winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The Science Fiction Writers of America honoured him as its second Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1976.

His last work ‘The Stonehenge Gate’ was published in 2005.

On 10th November 2006, John Stewart Williamson died at his home in Portales, New Mexico at age 98.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCI-FI Publishing
• Release date: Feb 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781787377615

Book preview

The Short Stories of Jack Williamson

John Stewart Williamson was born on 29th April 1908 in Bisbee, Arizona Territory. His early years were spent in Western Texas and then New Mexico.

Writing as Jack Williamson his first published story was ‘The Metal Man’ and it cover-featured on the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories.  He followed this up with many other cover-featured stories ‘Through the Purple Cloud’ (May 1931 Wonder Stories) his novella ‘Wolves of Darkness’ (January 1932 Strange Tales), ‘The Pigmy Planet’ (February 1932 Astounding Stories), ‘The Moon Era’ (February 1932 Wonder Stories), ‘Wizard's Isle’ (a novelette in the June 1934 Weird Tales).

As Nils O. Sonderlund, he published ‘The Angel from Hell’ in the December 1939 Marvel Tales. He also wrote under the names Will Stewart and John Stewart.

Early on, Williamson became impressed by the works of Miles J. Breuer, a doctor who in his spare time wrote science fiction. They began to collaborate, and Williamson’s work became more structured. Their first work was a novel; ‘Birth of a New Republic’ in which Moon colonies went through something akin to the American Revolution.

Williamson had been wracked by emotional torments and believed his physical ailments to be psychosomatic. He undertook psychiatric evaluation in 1933 in an attempt to resolve the conflict between his reason and his emotion. His stories now took on a grittier, more realistic tone.

Intriguingly a negative review of one of his books, which compared his writing to that of a comic strip, brought him the attention of The New York Sunday News, which needed a new comic strip. Williamson wrote the strip Beyond Mars (1952–55), loosely based on his novel ‘Seetee Ship’, until the paper dropped all comics.

Beginning 1954 Williamson and Frederick Pohl wrote more than a dozen science fiction novels together, including the series ‘Jim Eden’, ‘Starchild’, and ‘Cuckoo’.

Williamson now gathered up a clutch of awards winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The Science Fiction Writers of America honoured him as its second Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1976.

His last work ‘The Stonehenge Gate’ was published in 2005.

On 10th November 2006, John Stewart Williamson died at his home in Portales, New Mexico at age 98.

Index of Contents

Salvage in Space

The Pygmy Planet

The Cosmic Express

The Masked World

Salvage in Space

To Thad Allen, meteor miner, comes the dangerous bonanza of a derelict rocket-flier manned by death invisible

His planet was the smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest, Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge, bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly in the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass of meteoric iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark mystery of the void.

His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red. He had just finished securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head.

Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of metal―a jagged mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds of fragments, that he had captured and welded together. His luck had not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the spectro-flash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious metals was disappointingly minute.[1]

[Footnote 1: The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is mined by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law, should occupy this space.]

On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.

Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the vibration of the iron mass, beneath the rocket's regular thrust. The magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected. He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.

Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts? Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion, Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the unpaid last instalment on his Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him?

He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors for hard years, who still hoped.

But sometime fortune had to smile, and then....

The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red hills near Helion. A slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a girl waiting, at the silver door―a trim, slender girl in white, with blue eyes and hair richly brown.

Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday tramps through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could be bought, to find that its price was an amount that he might not amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white was yet only a glorious dream....

The strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it, pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled with far, cold stars.

Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in all the supernal vastness of space. And no work of man―save the few tools of his daring trade, and the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being must be tens of millions of miles away.

On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable. Now he was becoming accustomed to it. At least, he no longer feared that he was going mad. But sometimes....

Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his huge metal helmet:

"Brace up, old top. In good company, when you're by yourself, as Dad used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or so, anyhow. Look up Dan and 'Chuck' and the rest of the crowd again, at Comet's place. What price a friendly